Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

There is so much bullshit and lies about Qt5, I won't bother finishing that piece of crap:

Erik Engheim: Qt5 is 5GB Actual fact (on arch linux): qt5-base = 64.07 MiB, qt5-declarative = 24.72 MiB, qt5-quickcontrols2 = 8.56 MiB

> Try having somebody look at a Qt design you made. “Oops sorry you need a 5 GB download to do that. Oh and btw you need to register an account on a website, login and search really hard to find the free version.”

...blatant lie, etc. I won't bother, this guy is nuts. Thanks god for Qt, it has its quirks but on the desktop it's the best we can do to dev cross-platform

Erik Engheim: Consider Qt Creator IDE which is quite minimalist, without Qt which it requires to run, requires over 200 MB Actual fact: 108.03 MiB

The "excited about exploring the possibility of using a game engine for UI development" is fine, the "misrepresenting the alternatives" part, especially while ignoring all downsides of Godot, makes it look dodgy and detracts from the piece.

Godot is an incredibly good piece of technology, made by fantastic people.

But I'm not sure that I can echo the sentiment here exactly. I took the time to read the entire article.

This is what it boils down to for me:

IF you are going to build a native desktop app with a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor, I think it's arguably a solid choice over QT or whatever else you might do it with.

But the latter part of the article focuses on the argument against using web technologies:

  > My discussion of Web technologies needs some disclaimers. I have little experience with web technologies, and I am not very fond of web technology. I am an old school GUI toolkit guy, who did his first GUI stuff using the Intuition toolkit on an old Amiga 1000.

  There are a couple of really big problems I see however:

  2. It was made for web pages not applications. When trying to make a GUI for an application I found that I so often hit on the limitations imposed by the assumption that we are in some scrollable webpage.

  3. It is not made for reusable components, like real GUI toolkits.

From time to time, I hear this argument about how because web applications are run on the web, they're somehow fundamentally different from an application that might run on your phone or desktop natively in terms of appearance or UI capabilities.

It's all pixels on a screen. Any design asset you can whip up, with whatever animations and effects, can be rendered identically on a web, or native mobile/desktop app.

And modern web applications are entirely made of reusable components and the principles behind them.

I like to think I don't say without some perspective -- some of the first applications I ever wrote were VB.NET apps in Visual Studio 2007 using Windows Forms.

But today the idea of saying "An app made with web technologies cannot look or function quite like a native desktop app, and it lacks reusable components" is a bit wild.

Can you imagine trying to build 's desktop client with a WYSIWYG.

Finally, will conclude the rant here -- author talks about how Godot's 30MB compressed/70MB uncompressed size is fantastic, but with Tauri you can build native desktop apps using HTML/JS in 1-2MB.

https://tauri.studio

I also remember hating my computer for a while after as well

I did an Ask HN [1] about this topic a little while ago.

Most relevant comment [2], from gunibert is here:

The problem in a framework like GoDot is, that it is meant for Games. A game renders screens in 30/60 fps. A Desktop application like a Gtk application does exactly nothing if you dont interact with the application. If you click a button only the button gets re-rendered. This is more efficient then using something like a game engine which has no concept about damaged regions and so on.

Also, people like to have something like "native" look and feel. This would be possible with Java-SWT as it abstracts away the toolkit. This is possible but in the case of SWT it is just broken (think about margins, text, scroll behaviour).

The other option is to use electron as it is just plain simple, works even in the web (you can basically make a webapp and repackage that as an electron app)

Or you package a toolkit with your application and avoid native libraries. This happens in the world of Qt for example. Gtk is cross-platform too but not statically linkable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580213 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584258